The invention relates to a communication terminal, e.g. a cellular or cordless phone or a communicator, having a predictive text editor application for entering and editing data.
A cellular phone launched by the applicantxe2x80x94Nokia 3210(trademark)xe2x80x94a predictive character editor receives input strings from the keypad. U.S. Pat. No. 5,818,437 and WO 98/33111 describes predictive character editors. In order to minimise the size of the phones, it is necessary to reduce the number of keys.
According to a first aspect of the invention there is provided a user interface for a text entry device, comprising: a display having a first display section and a second display section; a keypad including a set of text entry keys each having a set of characters associated therewith; said set of characters associated with each of text entry keys being displayed in the second display section; predictive editor engine with associated directories and adapted to receive a string of input strokes and to output a list of matching word candidates in response thereto; a controller receiving inputs from set of text entry keys, and to generate said string of input strokes for the predictive editor, and the controller presents in said first display section at least one of said matching word candidates from the predictive character editor for selection by the user.
According to the preferred embodiment of the invention, a four way navigation key is used for entering letters. Few keys (e.g. 4 keys) are each associated with a plurality of letters (e.g. 6-8 letters). When searching records in a database (e.g. the phonebook) the user will have to press these few keys. Then the phone compares the ambiguous key stroke string with the content of the searched database the editor identifies the words fitting with the ambiguous key stroke string and displays one of the matching records. Hereby the user will only have to press a few keystrokes in order to unambiguously identify a searched record.
According to a second aspect of the invention there is provided a communication terminal having such a user interface.
According to a further aspect of the invention there is provided a method of handling a user interface for a communication terminal, and comprising steps of: displaying in the second display section of the display sets of characters associated with each of the text entry keys; pressing at least one of a set of text entry keys each having a set of characters associated therewith; generating a presentation of the string of input strokes and forwarding this presentation to a predictive editor engine with associated directories; said predictive character editor engine outputs a list of matching word candidates in response to a received presentation; and presenting in a first display section of the display at least one of said matching word candidates from the predictive editor for selection by the user.